The Augusta Chronicle’s smoke-filled newsroom on a football Friday night in the late 1980s hummed with activity.
Phones rang as coach after coach called in their game stats.
The closer it got to deadline, the more tension filled the room. Jerry Sanders was a likeable man – funny and kind, but you didn’t want to bother him then. He reminded me of the movie “Gremlins”. After midnight, you didn’t feed the Mogwai or get them wet; bad things would happen.
That was a little like Jerry, but you didn’t have to feed or water him. As deadline approached, phones slammed, curses were uttered and Jerry’s face and neck turned the brightest of reds.
A few desks away was Jerry’s polar opposite when it came to deadlines – Bill Baab.
Bill would chuckle and continue to read copy and write headlines. At some point, he’d join Jerry in the back shop, where the stories were literally pasted to the page before they’d be printed.
And every Friday night plus the other nights of the week, the paper would be completed and in someone’s driveway a few hours later despite the deadline stress.
Those are my earliest memories of Bill, who died on Dec. 20 at the age of 90. Read his obituary here.
I started my journalism career as a sports clerk while finishing my degree at Augusta College. I remember Bill, the Chronicle’s outdoors editor for many years, for several reasons including being the calming force on the sports desk. While I liked Jerry, I knew to stay far away from him as deadlines approached.
Chris Gay, who wrote sports for 20 years starting in January 1998, called Jerry and Bill the yin and yang.
“I never saw Bill get stressed out or frustrated,” Chris said.
Even under the pressure of deadlines, Bill wasn’t fazed.
“There could be 10 minutes to go, and I never saw him get upset or saw his face get red,” he said. “That’s such a good example for a writer. With game coverage, you’re on a constant deadline. You can’t get stressed. You have to lock it out and focus.”
Bill’s approach to deadlines gave me a clear image in my head of him as a fisherman even though I never went fishing with him.
I could picture him in a boat wearing a floppy hat adorned with fishing lures seated with a rod and reel and relaxing on a glass-surfaced lake.
Robbie Pavey, who worked for the Chronicle for more than three decades, knew that side of Bill.
He took over most of the outdoor coverage from Bill when Bill retired. The two of them shared a love of the outdoors, fishing and antique fishing lures and became friends when Robbie started with the Augusta Herald in 1982.
Robbie has tons of stories about Bill, sharing a select few.
Bill was an expert on George Perry, who on June 2, 1932, caught the world record largemouth bass in Telfair County, Georgia. He even wrote a book about Perry and his catch.
Robbie remembers traveling with Bill and his wife, Bea, to south Georgia to a Rotary Club meeting where they met the Japanese fisherman who tied the record. At the event, there was a replica of the giant bass that weighed 22-pounds-4-ounces.
“I got a picture of Bill kissing the giant bass,” said Robbie, lamenting that the digital image got lost somewhere in the past decade. “He had a great sense of humor.”
He was known for his puns. I think you have to be punny in order to write good headlines. And most readers didn’t know that he spent most of his time at the sports desk while working – not at the lake, fishing.
Robbie said people thought he had a cushy gig when he took over the outdoor page, but that was only a few hours of his job a week.
Bill also had a love of history and became an expert in local bottles. Some of the bottles he collected are part of a permanent display at the Augusta Museum of History..
Robbie went bottle excavating with Bill and Bea once with the stipulation that he couldn’t divulge the exact location of the south Augusta site where the bottles had been dumped decades before. He said the Baabs leased the former dump site and would hire someone with a backhoe to clear off the dirt so they could dig. Robbie said he had a lot of fun that day.
I remembered covering one of his talks at the Aiken County Library more than 15 years ago and writing about his bottle collecting passion. He wrote and published three books related to area companies that sold products in glass bottles.
I don’t know how it came up in conversation, but Bill once told me that if I ever wrote a book he’d edit it for me.
In 2012, I published my first novel, and he did an early round of edits. He even gave me a quote to use on the back of the book.
“’I am 77 years of age and have been a reader of mysteries and adventure books since my teenage years. The book piqued my interest to where I hated to put it down. Now Mrs. Brackett tells me she is thinking of writing a sequel. I can’t wait to read it,’” Bill Baab, outdoor writer for The Augusta Chronicle, historian and published author,” was the exact quote he wanted used.
I could write so much more, but I’ll stop here with one final thought – Thank you, Bill, for being a mentor and friend.
Charmain Z. Brackett, the publisher of Augusta Good News and Inspiring: Women of Augusta, has covered Augusta’s news for more than 35 years. She’s won multiple Georgia Press Association awards and is the recipient of the 2018 Greater Augusta Arts Council’s media award. Reach her at charmain@augustagoodnews.com. Sign up for the newsletter here.
